Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (46 page)

 

ARTIST:
Michael Fernandes

THIS IS ART?
Fernandes placed a banana on the windowsill of an art gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and titled it
Banana
. Each night during July 2008, Fernandes replaced the banana with a slightly greener one to represent the “reversing of the aging process.” Two collectors put holds on the work. “You do realize it’s a banana, don’t you?” gallery owner Victoria Page asked them. Instead of actual fruit, however, the winning bidder received photographs of the bananas. Price: $2,500.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
“Like bananas, we humans are also temporal, but we live as if we are not.”

 

ARTIST:
Tim Knowles

THIS IS ART?
Although Knowles props up the canvas and attaches the pens to the tips of the branches, it’s the willow trees that do the work…and the oaks, sycamores, and so on. Guided by the wind, the trees paint delicate patterns that, to the unsophisticated eye, look like random scribbles on a canvas. The British artist has sold his works for thousands of dollars in galleries all over the world.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
“The work attempts to make visible the invisible.”

 

ARTIST:
Paul McCarthy

THIS IS ART?
McCarthy is a 63-year-old American artist who gained fame in the 1960s for using his body as a paint brush and then using some of his bodily fluids as paint. His latest piece of “shocking” art is a house-sized balloon shaped like a giant pile of dog doo. (The work made headlines in 2008 when it came loose from its moorings outside of a Swiss art museum and flew 200 yards before landing on the grounds of a children’s home, where it broke a window.)

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
“To put an unrefined, clumsy-appearing object into art is a political act.”

 

ARTIST:
Tracey Emin

THIS IS ART?
Emin created shockwaves with her controversial piece
My Bed
when it was displayed at London’s Tate Gallery in 1999. It was just that—her messy bed, with crumpled bed sheets and dirty clothes on the floor next to it. But what shocked the public the most was her inclusion of used condoms and women’s underwear. Although the installation was described as “crass” and “vulgar,” Emin was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. She didn’t win, but her dirty bed sold for £150,000 ($211,000).
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
“When I got the phrase ‘media whore’ thrown in my face, I thought, oh my god, if you only knew.”

 

ARTIST:
Aelita Andre

THIS IS ART?
This artist’s abstract paintings were very well received at the Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, in 2009. Renowned art critic Robert Nelson described them as “heavily reliant on figure/ground relations.” They were priced between $250 and $1,400. It was later revealed, however, that Aelita was only 22 months old when she painted them. The doodles were submitted by her mother, Russian photographer Nikka Kalashnikova, who kept the artist’s age to herself until after the work was approved.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
“Baba! Mama! (spittle).”

 

ARTIST:
Deborah Grumet

THIS IS ART?
Titled
Studies in Digestion
, Grumet’s 18” x 24” colored-pencil drawing is separated into four quadrants, each depicting the human digestive system in the style of a famous artist: Keith Haring’s graffiti, Georges Seurat’s pointillism, René Magritte’s surrealism, and Pablo Picasso’s single-line drawings. Grumet couldn’t get a gallery to display the work (it was actually rejected by the Museum of Bad Art in Dedham, Massachusetts, as “too commercial”), so she auctioned it online, offering the proceeds to the struggling art museum at Brandeis University. No bidders chose the “Buy It Now” option for $10,000, but the gutsy painting did sell…for $152.53.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
“If you scroll way, way, down towards the bottom of the Wikipedia article about the Museum of Bad Art, you will see that my
Studies in Digestion
drawing is mentioned. This could be my proudest moment ever!” (Until she finds out that she made it into an
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
.)

We like to include a wide variety of topics in our
Bathroom Readers.
Here are some real books that have a much more limited focus.

Anna Labita was standing in the kitchen of her Pinellas Park, Florida, home in 2009 when she heard a noise coming from her garage. She slowly opened the door, and there, only a few feet away, was an 8-foot-long alligator leaning up against the wall. It was staring right at her—at eye level. Labita slowly
closed
the door and called 911. A reptile control officer came out (they get a lot of work during the spring mating season) and taped the hungry gator’s mouth shut before hauling it off.

Several drivers traveling Interstate 5 just south of Stanwood, Washington, in 2008 reported seeing a 250-pound black bear that seemed to be living in a small stand of trees between four lanes of 65-mph traffic. Officials were worried: Either a driver would slow down to gawk at the bear and cause an accident, or worse yet, the bear would try to cross the road and cause an accident. When game wardens realized that the bear had been living in the median for almost a year, they knew there was little chance he’d leave on his own. So they baited a trap with pickled herring, bacon grease, honey, and doughnuts. It worked…and the bear was introduced into a new habitat in the foothills of the Cascade mountain range.

In 2007 a wild turkey chased Kettly Jean-Felix down a sidewalk, across Beacon Street, and into an optometrist’s office—pecking at her bottom the whole way. “It was so scary!” she said. It turns out this turkey wasn’t alone. Boston police had been receiving
hundreds
of calls from people who were harassed by the ornery birds. Interestingly, wild turkeys flourished in eastern Massachusetts until the 1850s. But by the 20th century, overhunting had driven them nearly to extinction. Efforts to revitalize the population in rural areas began in the 1970s and were extremely successful. One
thing that officials never anticipated, though, was that thousands of the birds would end up invading the cities and suburbs.

In June 2008, Chicago resident Holly Grosso was walking down the sidewalk on West Grand Avenue talking on her mobile phone when, “Something just came down, pecked me in the head, pulled out my hair, and then flew away. It was so bizarre. It was a little bird.” That little bird was actually a red-winged blackbird, and during nesting season, they’re very territorial, having been known to take on much larger vultures and ospreys. Grosso’s attacker pursued many victims that summer, earning it the nickname “Hitchcock” (after the man who directed the 1963 horror film
The Birds
).

When Cassandra Frank of St. Petersburg, Florida, awoke on a spring morning in 2009, she heard strange noises coming from her backyard. Still groggy, she went to investigate. All of a sudden, she saw a black, 200-pound sow charging her. It happened so fast that Frank had no chance of getting out of the way. The animal pierced her left leg with one tusk and pinned her up against a tree, squealing the entire time (the pig, not Frank). Then the sow ran off and terrorized a few other people in the neighborhood. It took nine men from animal control to capture it. Frank was fortunate—she escaped with minor injuries and only had to get a tetanus shot. Officials aren’t sure how such a big wild pig—normally found in the forests—made it so far into the suburbs.

At 7:10 a.m. on April 29, 2009, employees at a Salem, Oregon, aerospace manufacturing plant suddenly heard a loud POP! Then all of the lights and all of the machines shut down. Upon investigating the outage, one of the workers found the culprit: a large fish, burned to a crisp, lying on the ground beneath some nearby power lines. The electric company concluded that the fish was accidentally dropped onto the line by an osprey (they nest in the area). “This is the first instance we’ve heard of a fish causing a power outage,” said Bob Valdez of the Oregon Public Utility Commission, adding, “Cooked squirrel is pretty common, though.”

Ever heard of
alchemy
? It was a medieval “science” and philosophy, and one of its goals was to find a way to turn base metals into gold through a process called
transmutation
. Scientists now know that this is impossible, but in the 1600s, it was a viable—and potentially lucrative—form of research.

An alchemist from Hamburg, Germany, named Hennig Brand believed the way to create gold was by chemically altering a very common substance: urine. At the time, it made sense. A prevailing theory of the day was that because urine and gold were both yellow, some advanced form of alchemy might be able to turn one into the other.

With this in mind, Brand spent months collecting urine. When he’d accumulated 50 buckets of the stuff—mostly donated by local soldiers—he went to the second phase of his plan: He put them in his basement to “age,” or allow the water to evaporate out and concentrate the urine.

One day in 1669, Brand was experimenting with his bucketloads of concentrated soldier pee and came up with something interesting. Scientists later figured out that this is what he did: First, he boiled the urine until it was what chefs call a “reduction”—a thick, condensed syrup with most of the water evaporated out of it. The bright yellow reduction was then heated until it coalesced into three separate substances (which we now know were mostly made up of
phosphates
): a reddish oil, a porous black material, and a salty residue.

Brand discarded the salt, then mixed the red oil back into the spongy black stuff, which he then heated for the better part of a day, probably about 16 hours. At this point, the mixture started breaking down into the various chemicals of which it was composed.
White smoke poured out into the air, then oil dripped out, and finally all that was left was a waxy liquid.

Brand had never seen anything like it—it was a vibrant blue-green and appeared to glow, both in the light and in the dark. Brand tested the ominous goo by placing it in a jar of cold water. Not only did the substance hold together, it hardened and cooled and became icy to the touch. Although Brand had absolutely no idea what he’d just discovered (or created), he knew he was on to something. But after six years of experimenting on the greenish stuff (and hundreds more buckets of urine), he still hadn’t struck gold. He hadn’t even figured out how to make a second batch.

Another German alchemist, Daniel Kraft, had heard about the results of Brand’s experiments, and in 1675 he went to Hamburg to either buy a load of the blue-green extract or at least learn how to make it. Brand was desperate for money (six years of fruitless experimentation while living off his wife’s inheritance had left him nearly broke), so he decided to sell what remained of the blue goo to Kraft…since he didn’t know how to re-create it.

It didn’t matter, because Kraft wasn’t concerned with the science behind the substance, or even with the potential of turning it into gold—he wanted to use it to make money
now.
How’d he do it? He travelled around and made a fortune showing it off to royalty and other wealthy Europeans. Kraft’s act was basically magic tricks: He’d light candles with the stuff, throw it into gunpowder to make explosions, and write glowing blue-green words with it. He’d pass it around the room to show that it was cold to the touch. And Kraft always told audiences that he’d discovered the substance himself.